【专访】Maemo 社区委员会主席 Valério D Valério，首谈 MeeGo

中文版 | English Version

iFanr: Can you tell us how you joined in maemo community and became the Chair of the Maemo Community council? Maybe share some stories about the community and yourself?

Valério: I’m not one of the oldest members of the community, the Maemo community started around 2005, I only joined the community in 2008. I already knew Maemo for some time, but in the summer of 2008 I was select for a project in Google Summer of Code, working for OpenMoko, nowadays a dead platform. My project needed a lot of Bluetooth coding, so I was lucky to find a co-mentor from the BlueZ project(Linux Bluetooth stack) that helped me a lot, he worked in some Maemo projects(Canola, Carman, …), so he introduced me a bit more to Maemo. When I finished my project I got a N810 in order to port my code to Maemo, this project is now known as BlueMaemo.
I joined the community first as a lurker, after a while I started asking questions in the IRC and in the mailing lists, people were very nice and helpful, I think that was the main reason to stick within the community.
Since I’ve a great passion for the Google Summer of Code program, the program gave me a lot, I proposed inside the Maemo community a application as mentoring organization in 2009, that way we could promote more our community and get some students labor
We were chosen as a mentoring organization and got 10 students to work with us, the program was a success for us, we intend to run again this year.
After the work done in Summer of code program, and also because I’ve some experience organizing events, the Community Council invited me to be one of the members of the Maemo summit call for papers committee, I accepted the invitation, and I think we did a great job, the Maemo Summit 2009, held in Amsterdam was a great success.
In September 2009 I was nominated for the Community Council, I accepted, run and the community choose me, that’s it

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Community

iFanr: How’s the cooperation between Nokia and Maemo Community? Would you like to share some stories about how you, Community Council,  cowork together to get things done?

Valério: The cooperation is great, Nokia is very open with us and tries to help the community all the time.
We currently have 6 community members sponsored by Nokia working for the community, mostly in our infrastructure and helping the community developers and newcomers.

From time to time Nokia puts important decisions in our hands, like select community members to have early access to devices/new firmware versions, select sponsored participants for events around the world among other things.

iFanr: Where’s the name “Maemo” come from?

Valério: Well, I’m not the more appropriate person to explain that, but here’s some explanations: http://stezz.blogspot.com/2008/10/where-maemo-is-coming-from.html

iFanr: Does Maemo has her own mascot like many other open source communities do?

Valério: No, but the community is brainstorming something for a while: http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=28965

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Developing

iFanr: From your blog we know about BlueMaemo. How do you feel about your developing experience in Maemo?

Valério: Is quite good, because my background is Linux, was very easy for me, but I’ve to agree that currently the learning curve is much higher than the majority of the other mobile platforms out there, I used to said that Maemo is for true coders . But things will improve a lot with the adoption of Qt and Nokia WRT.

iFanr: It’s said the community vote to decide on whether certain app can get into extras. Can you tell us the mechanism you adopt? What’s your suggestions for developers?

Valério: We’ve a Q&A process based in simple rules, we don’t do any censorship or judgments based in ugly UIs, as long the apps works as advertised and don’t have critical bugs or power flaws, we’re good. The developers have to understand that we need to protect the end users that are usually less skilled and can’t deal with unstable applications.

Our Q&A process is explained here, we’re still refining it: http://wiki.maemo.org/Extras-testing and http://wiki.maemo.org/Extras-testing/QA_Checklist

We encourage the developers to upload to Extras, because they will increase the users base of their apps and also will receive Karma. We’ve a rewarding system that measures the contributions of each community members, that system is used for several things, like discounts in devices, sponsored trips, t-shirts, ability to vote and run for the Community Council, etc..

iFanr: What opportunities will the billing mode of ovi store bring to mid-hi level open source app developers in maemo.org? Do you personally have plans for some billing apps?

Valério: No I don’t have, if Nokia lower the entry barrier, I predict that a lot of community members will benefit a lot, anyway we’re studying the possibilities for a donation system for the apps in Extras, some apps there already offer that possibility.

iFanr: Will the upcoming Qt make a lot of developers choose to wait till its formal release instead of joining in right now?

Valério: Don’t think so, Qt for Maemo is in beta now, but is quite good already, but I think that the mass adoption of Qt in Symbian will bring a lot of developers to Maemo, so perhaps they are waiting for a final Qt release in Symbian, more that they are in Maemo.

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Maemo VS the others

iFanr: The difficulties of native development in Linux is known to all. There are 3 major mobile platfrom based on Linux: webOS, Android and Maemo: the first two provide high-level APIs and easy-to-use libraries via Java or Javescript. This may reduce system efficiency, but it can simplify developer’s work. Why Maemo does not follow this pattern but instead insists on providing native APIs as the primary development environment? Which one do the developers prefer, native or Python?

Valério: You can use Javascript with Qt, but Nokia WRT and QML are also coming to Maemo.

In my opinion that’s one of the flaws that Maemo has at the moment, mobile OSs need damn simple toolkits in order to attract a lot of developers and thus a lot of apps will be available, that should be fixed in the next months.

Currently we’ve a lot of distinct developers some prefer Python other prefer C/C++, but was I said the possibilities are endless you can also use other programing languages.

iFanr: ”I don’t see anything in Android which would make it better than Linux maemo” Ukko Lappalainen once said that. What do you think are the pros and cons of the two platforms？

Valério: Maemo is stock Linux so the possibilities are endless, you have much more freedom of use and you can hack the entire phone. The sense of openness in Android is more blurry, you don’t have such possibilities, but the OS right now is more spread than Maemo and has more applications, also has a lot of hype created by Google.

From a user point of view I can like android, the system is polished and work well, but from a developer point of view it looses everything, the system is quite limited, you can’t hack much in the low level and it is heavily controlled by Google, that’s also a bit scary .

Maemo is older than Android, but is only raising now, because the previous devices aren’t phones, so needs to catch the attention of the developers and the big companies, but from what I’ve seen so far I predict a very bright future for Maemo .

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Locale Community

iFanr: It’s still far from perfect when talking about international support on Maemo comparing with Symbian. How can Maemo community support users from other countries like China? Have Nokia got into the work for Maemo’s international support?

Valério: I don’t know about Nokia’s plans on that, but I’ve seen a couple of community members working in different input methods, we already have a few new ones, that’s the power of our community, if doesn’t exist the community can create it. A great example was the FM radio, the community made a application to use the FM radio before the device was released, because the Maemo OS doesn’t offer such possibility out of the box, same for MMS support, We’ve very talented persons in the community.

iFanr: Is there any community effort to coordinate translation/localization projects by teams from different countries. Currently the Chinese localization project is done rather isolated from the international Maemo community.

Valério: Currently some people are using Transifex, but there’s a bigger plan for Maemo6 at least:  http://wiki.maemo.org/Objective:Community_localization and http://wiki.maemo.org/Maemo-Barcelona_Long_Weekend/Localization

iFanr: Any suggestion on connecting Chinese maemo communities to talk.maemo.org?

Valério: I know that a lot of people don’t understand English, in my opinion is better to have separated localized forums, but for tutorials and how-to’s is better to have everything in just one place, that in my opinion should be the maemo.org wiki, we already have some articles in Chinese, but we need much more.

For forums we need active members that can bring informations to the English forums about the Chinese community(and other communities), cool hacks, new apps, etc, and also take information from the English forums to the Chinese ones, that way we can improve the interaction a lot.

iFanr: What should Chinese developers do to soonly intergrated into Maemo.org community? Some local apps, such as railway data query apps are very helpful to Chinese users, but that seems hard to get into extras repository. Do you have suggestions on this situation?

Valério: I don’t think it is hard to upload to extras, the developers only have to follow some simple rules, if they have doubts/problems they should ask in our IRC/mailing lists/forums, our community is very friendly and helpful.

iFanr: We think it may be hard for highly localized apps (such as railway data query app they mentioned or Russian social network app in extras-devel) to get enough votes from extras-testing QA process, since most active community members, especially senior ones, are probably not interested in them. Hence, we feel that those localized apps may need different QA process (or more cooperation between local Maemo forums and maemo.org).

Valério: That’s true, let’s see if we can change that with the Testing squad .

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MeeGo

iFanr: What’s your personal opinion on this merge? not all people in maemo.org think it’s positive.

Valério: I’m very positive about the merge, Intel and Nokia were already collaborating in some projects, with the merge they will collaborate even more for sure, avoiding fragmentation. For the open source world in general, these are very good news, because the two companies will concentrate in upstream projects that are the building blocks of any modern Linux distributions.

Other thing that can worry people is the control/influence that Nokia and Intel will have, this can be seen as ‘evil’, but seeing the Linux Foundation leading this consortium and by their proven record, I think we can be less worried.

iFanr: Many people concerned that N900 may not get a major update, like Maemo 6 or MeeGo 1.0, do you think so?

Valério: Many users make a lot of wrong assumptions, Maemo5 is not legacy, updates are coming and the system is day by day better, also I think when we bought a device we’re not expecting it to run the next 10 0Ss, same for a laptop with a proprietary OS for example.

But I can bet that the N900 will run Maemo6, even if not all the features or not supported by Nokia, the community will do it, and will not be that hard since almost everything will be opensource software, we already have the Maemo6 UI library running in the N900. Of course I understand why Nokia can’t promise anything right now, things change very fast, and then they would be lying to the community.

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People

iFanr: Can you also introduce some maemo stars?

Valério: yes, we have some ‘rock stars’ inside the community, from a developers point of view, the most famous are:

*Gary Birkett, author of a sketching application(liqbase) full of animations that runs in the old devices without 3d acceleration, very low level code.

*Andrew Flegg -  author of some developers tools and Hermes a application that retrieves your contacts information from facebook, twitter,… and merge that info inside the built-in contacts applications, he’s also a former council member(Inaugural council and second term)

*Faheem Pervez – He’s a legend, started contributing to the community with 15 years old, one of the most competent hackers inside the community, he has done lots of application ports(games, simple utilities, …) and recently he has done a lot of very useful small widgets and control panel applets.

* Martin Grimm – He did a application to control the FM radio HW in the N900 before the device started to ship, he’s also the author of MediaBox a very well known application.

No-developers:

*Andrew Zhilin – Our community designer, he’s very talented has helped in several projects and made some themes.

*Tim Samoff – Former council member, participated in the first two councils, he’s also a designer, helped a lot in the maemo.org website.

*Randall Arnold – Community man, his focus are mostly user topics, help newcomers, start new activities, he’s a member of the current Community Council.

There’s a lot of interesting people in the community, very hard to name all of them

iFanr: Some says Maemo devices are nothing but geeks’ toys,  it will never reach a commercial success as iPhone and Symbian do. What do you think of this?

Valério: They were in the past, I can agree in part with that, but in my opinion the N900 is not a geeks’ device, but a power users device, so is not suitable for every one, for that reason Nokia have a big range of different devices, and that’s the correct approach in my opinion, one device doesn’t fits all, my mom or my dad don’t want an touch device for example, because they want a device with physical keys.

iFanr: Can you talk a bit about the smartphones in Portugal?

Valério: We’re one the countries in the world with one of the highest cellphone ratio per capita, a study from 2004 revealed ~14,000,000 cellphones for a population around 10,700,00, of course the majority of the phones here are dumbphones, but we’ve a lot of smartphones as well. Surprisingly the IPhone didn’t sell much around here, neither the Android devices, HTC devices have bad reputation around here. Nokia still dominate the market, but Samsung is raising a lot in the last years.

iFanr: Do you have many smartphone choices from carriers?

Valério: Yes, a lot, and we used to have the phones right after the announcements, we don’t have to wait much for phones from the main brands, that’s good.

iFanr: Do you see many N900 users around you?

Valério: Not so many, I would say that the ratio is a bit less than the Android devices, so quite low.

iFanr: Are you yourself a gadgeteer? What’s your idea on recently released iPad from Apple?

Valério: Yes, I like gadgets a lot. The iPad is a shinny device like any other Apple product, but for the functionalities point of view, it doesn’t convince me, I can’t see any advantage compared to a laptop, only a lot of disadvantages, and also the device is very locked to Apple that’s not good either.

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Maemo the name

by Stezz

I will try to tell the story as my friend mooch told me quite some time ago.
It was the beginning of the internet tablets, it was so beginning that the tablets were just called “devices” and that the 770 was only a prototype. I wasn’t there yet but mooch told me he was and he just received his brand new shiny desktop to start doing something.

In the search for a new name for his machine he fired up the good old ‘pwgen’ utility. Strange and incomprehensible names started to come up on the screen. One of those wasn’t really maemo but it was really close to be (pwgen default is to give you 8 chars strings). He extrapolated somehow maemo from the 8 chars displaying on the screen and he dig up in the internet finding out that maemo didn’t really mean that much besides something in a dialect on the other part of the world and he decided to choose that as the name of his desktop.

At that time he was the IT guy in the organization and he started to use his desktop to collect packages that developers were sending him over e-mail, ftp… (yeah it was really the beginning).

In few months his desktop was clogged with packages and he couldn’t use it anymore as his desktop but it became quite useful as central repository for the developers.

He had to grow it with more disk space and move to another 2x CPU box. When services and needs grew way too much for the little power provided by 2GB and 2x PIII 700MHz, he ordered a new machine that became THE Server.

Someday after some other months somebody came into the room and asked him if Nokia could use that name to register a domain to publish some sdk. Without second thoughts he told “Of course”.

Well that was the beginning of maemo.org .

Kudos to mooch

黄俊杰 (Logout)

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